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I think I'll quote somebody out of context, because that's always worked really well for me in the past.
Saying "black characters are written too broadly in New Who, making them resemble stereotypes" rather ignores the fact that white characters are treated the same way.
Look. This is the problem with trying to raise white people on Sesame Street in order to cure racism: you get a generation of white people who think it's to their credit that they hold everyone to the same standard, and run around operating like the world is one big, happy block party -- people who think they're complementing themselves when they say they're "colorblind."
BLIND is not a moral positive. BLIND is an inability to perceive what the non-blind people around you can clearly fucking see. My grandfather was red/green colorblind. His family also had a strawberry farm. His father used to beat him for not obeying instructions to pick only the RED strawberries and leave the GREEN ones on the bush.
Now, I'm not recommending regular beatings for the colorblind. That wasn't a nice thing to do (my great-grandfather was not a nice person in general, for oh so many reasons). But the thing is, my grandfather's colorblindness? Was a problem, because there is actually such a thing as color when it comes to strawberries, and it's easier to work on a strawberry farm when you can see it.
And there is actually such a thing as race. If you can't see it, you're not doing yourself or anyone else any favors. There are cases where you can give the EXACT SAME script/character arc/iconography/etc. to a white performer and to a performer of color, and the overall effect WILL BE DIFFERENT. Race is real. People respond to it, often on levels they aren't entirely aware of. So it actually misses the whole entire point of discussing race and racism if your sole defense is "but we're just treating them the exact same way we treat white characters!" It may be true, or it may not be true, but either way it's singularly useless.
Some fans seem to find gender easier to understand than race, so think of it this way: if there's a character that isn't very bright but always uses sexuality to manipulate other people, does it make a difference if that character is a man or a woman? Isn't it more of a stereotype in one case than in the other? And if some writer or producer said, "Oh, it's not sexist -- this is just what we were going to do, and we thought we might hire a male actor, but we went with a woman instead, so we kept the same stuff!" that doesn't magically make her not a sexist cliche, does it? If they'd cast a man, the character would read one way; when they do cast a woman, it reads differently. Same character. Different, because of the baggage we bring surrounding gender. If you were somehow magically oblivious to any and all gender issues, you might not notice that. But you wouldn't thereby be a better person than the rest of us. You'd just be oblivious.
Unfortunately, in our culture, we are conditioned to see white people as Real People, and black people as sort of thin slices of people, operating in one of a very few available modes and with only a very few emotions and interests. Therefore it's just different to write a white character "broadly" versus a black character. It's not enough to write the black character "just like" all your white characters, because race is not invisible to most of us and it doesn't have no consequences. In order to challenge people's already racist assumptions about black characters, writers have to work that much harder, and they have to work not blind. They have to work with their eyes open and their brains engaged and with the awareness of subtle signals and context and connotation that anyone who writes for a living should damn well be conversant with. To do less than that is to write lazily, to write foolishly, to write contemptuously of one's characters and one's craft, and to do all that because you can't or won't go the extra mile to bring race into the universe of stuff that factors into your writing does, in fact, have racist implications.
"Colorblindness" may be one's reason for making all of those mistakes, but it isn't an excuse, and it doesn't magically make the product impervious from criticism. Be less blind.
Saying "black characters are written too broadly in New Who, making them resemble stereotypes" rather ignores the fact that white characters are treated the same way.
Look. This is the problem with trying to raise white people on Sesame Street in order to cure racism: you get a generation of white people who think it's to their credit that they hold everyone to the same standard, and run around operating like the world is one big, happy block party -- people who think they're complementing themselves when they say they're "colorblind."
BLIND is not a moral positive. BLIND is an inability to perceive what the non-blind people around you can clearly fucking see. My grandfather was red/green colorblind. His family also had a strawberry farm. His father used to beat him for not obeying instructions to pick only the RED strawberries and leave the GREEN ones on the bush.
Now, I'm not recommending regular beatings for the colorblind. That wasn't a nice thing to do (my great-grandfather was not a nice person in general, for oh so many reasons). But the thing is, my grandfather's colorblindness? Was a problem, because there is actually such a thing as color when it comes to strawberries, and it's easier to work on a strawberry farm when you can see it.
And there is actually such a thing as race. If you can't see it, you're not doing yourself or anyone else any favors. There are cases where you can give the EXACT SAME script/character arc/iconography/etc. to a white performer and to a performer of color, and the overall effect WILL BE DIFFERENT. Race is real. People respond to it, often on levels they aren't entirely aware of. So it actually misses the whole entire point of discussing race and racism if your sole defense is "but we're just treating them the exact same way we treat white characters!" It may be true, or it may not be true, but either way it's singularly useless.
Some fans seem to find gender easier to understand than race, so think of it this way: if there's a character that isn't very bright but always uses sexuality to manipulate other people, does it make a difference if that character is a man or a woman? Isn't it more of a stereotype in one case than in the other? And if some writer or producer said, "Oh, it's not sexist -- this is just what we were going to do, and we thought we might hire a male actor, but we went with a woman instead, so we kept the same stuff!" that doesn't magically make her not a sexist cliche, does it? If they'd cast a man, the character would read one way; when they do cast a woman, it reads differently. Same character. Different, because of the baggage we bring surrounding gender. If you were somehow magically oblivious to any and all gender issues, you might not notice that. But you wouldn't thereby be a better person than the rest of us. You'd just be oblivious.
Unfortunately, in our culture, we are conditioned to see white people as Real People, and black people as sort of thin slices of people, operating in one of a very few available modes and with only a very few emotions and interests. Therefore it's just different to write a white character "broadly" versus a black character. It's not enough to write the black character "just like" all your white characters, because race is not invisible to most of us and it doesn't have no consequences. In order to challenge people's already racist assumptions about black characters, writers have to work that much harder, and they have to work not blind. They have to work with their eyes open and their brains engaged and with the awareness of subtle signals and context and connotation that anyone who writes for a living should damn well be conversant with. To do less than that is to write lazily, to write foolishly, to write contemptuously of one's characters and one's craft, and to do all that because you can't or won't go the extra mile to bring race into the universe of stuff that factors into your writing does, in fact, have racist implications.
"Colorblindness" may be one's reason for making all of those mistakes, but it isn't an excuse, and it doesn't magically make the product impervious from criticism. Be less blind.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-15 08:41 pm (UTC)From:Thank you for an incredible post.
I've read over the comments fairly carefully (because, in part, I'm thinking about doing a scholarly presentation on how discussions of race/racism go on in fandom and wanted to see how the comments here fit in with some patterns I've seen in the SGA conflict a few months ago), and found myself grinding my teeth several times (maybe should go put the jaw split I just got because of stress and wear it!) because of being reminded of a lot of years trying to teach multiethnic literatures of the U.S. in rural Texas where my white students reassured me over and over again that there is no racism (currently) (and no sexism either) which, as I pointed out constantly, I never ever heard from a black student (unfortunately I heard over and over again the 'no sexism' argument from female students).
As an Anglo myself, I spent a lot of years learning about my own racist ideas (I grew up in Idaho, before the Aryan Nation arrived, but there are many reasons why they chose Idaho) which not only came from growing up where and when I did (we white girls were reminded constantly that the "Indian boys" left the reservations on the weekend to drive around looking for white girls to rape), but from years spent in literature programs where no African-American authors were mentioned, let alone taught (I was born in '55, was in college during the 70s--white and mostly male). I am still working on it as well as my own ignorance of class, and ability issues. I can never imagine not working to become more conscious of the unconscious assumptions and, yes, blind spots.
One of the things that struck me in some of the comments was the insistence that "equality" somehow means some weird mathematical version where, somehow, mentioning difference is the same as being racist because (yes, as you said, Sesame Street!) we're not supposed to "see" difference (but we all do, and more than that, act on it in ways we are not even conscious of most of the time). And yet I can point to study after study after study showing how racial attitudes influence everything from restaurant service to mortgage to hiring to health care to....everything.
OTOH, since the U.S. Supreme Court was engaged in just that kind of thinking and rhetoric in its recent decision, I guess I should not be surprised that it's being parroted by so many people.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-15 09:53 pm (UTC)From:And that's a huge part of the reason I automatically mistrust the people who make colorblindness-based arguments. The worst of them, of course, are just being self-congratulatory and smug while exempting themselves from any responsibility for racism, which is clearly the fault of other people, *racist* people, and therefore not their problem -- but even the very best of them, the ones who genuinely believe it, I just look at them and think, If you've done so little critical thinking about race and its effects in general, how can I imagine you're conscious of everything that's going on with yourself? I think about it a *lot,* and I still frequently have these surprising moments of, "Who knew *that* was stuck in my head?"
since the U.S. Supreme Court was engaged in just that kind of thinking and rhetoric in its recent decision, I guess I should not be surprised that it's being parroted by so many people
It's certainly an immensely appealing thing to believe. As someone else said, "I don't want to be racist, so therefore I'm not anymore! Thank goodness!" Confronting one's own racism is scary and guilt-inducing -- I don't enjoy it more than anyone else does! I understand. But the price of not doing it, for the world at large, just seems too high to me.